The 5 Secrets of the Beatles’ (and Your) Success
You’ll wish you had discovered #5 years ago
The Beatles were flying on Pan Am flight 101, on their way for their first US tour, and they were troubled about their chances of success.
Paul McCartney said, “They’ve got their own groups. What are we going to give them that they don’t already have?”
John Lennon concluded, “We won’t make it.”
But as they neared New York, the pilot had astonishing news: “Tell the boys there’s a big crowd waiting for them.”
And the plane descended into the madness that became known as Beatlemania: 4,000 screaming fans, some of them injured in the crush, and others who even fainted. 200 reporters. 100 police officers.
40 percent of the American population watched their two appearances on the Ed Sullivan show. They played to over 20,000 fans in each of two concerts, then they returned to over 10,000 fans waiting for them in the UK.
Two months later, their songs occupied the top five slots of the Billboard top-songs chart.
The Beatles came out of nowhere — at least that’s what it seemed like in the United States. They were revolutionary. They were thrilling. And everybody was talking about them.
But did they come out of nowhere?
And how could this possibly be useful to you?
The Beatles’ success story (the short version)
The story begins in July 1957, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney started playing music together as teenagers. But according to Beatles historian Ian Inglis, “they were really just a collection of four or five teenagers who had vague ambitions about being successful musically but nothing more than that.”
Starting in 1960, they gained a tremendous amount of experience playing in Liverpool and in Hamburg (more on that later), but they were rejected by at least five record labels before getting their record contract with EMI in June, 1962. During 1962 and 1963, they became increasingly popular in Europe. Then they debuted in early 1964, which was the beginning of their worldwide popularity.
To summarize: a slow start, four years of serious work, a few rejections by record labels, and then fame. Right?
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To get the complete picture, you have to know about Hamburg.
Why was Hamburg so important?
When they arrived in Hamburg, Germany, on Aug. 17, 1960, they had no idea how hard it would be. They first played at the Indra Club, which was located near the heart of the city’s red-light district.
The Indra, a former strip joint, was cramped, threadbare, and trashy. The room they were given to live in was behind the screen of a seedy cinema across the street. Lennon recalled, “We were living right next to the ladies’ toilet. We had to use cold water from the urinals to wash and shave.” And to add to their misery, what little they were paid forced them to live in squalid poverty.
But this was only misery. What happened next was much, much worse.
Being musicians was no longer enough
Their work schedule was grueling, and they never had a day off. The group worked 10 hours a day on weeknights, 12 hours on Saturdays, and eight hours on Sundays. Add three hours a day for practicing and deciding how they needed to improve their act, and you get a total of about 90 hours a week.
They felt overwhelmed and out of their depth. They had to play loud to get customers into the club, then keep their attention to keep them buying drinks. A renter above the club complained to the police about the noise, and the Beatles were forced to play with the volume turned down.
Being musicians was no longer enough — they had to put on a show to keep the customers in their seats. Just singing a set of songs and repeating them to fill up the time didn’t work here.
They did crazy things. They improvised the on-stage antics (unheard of at that time) that they later became known for. John Lennon stood outside the club clad only in underpants (!) in just-above-freezing weather, inviting passers-by to see the show. Once, he came onstage wearing a toilet seat on his neck. “We really had to find a new way of playing,” he later said.
The band members worked to exhaustion–and then they worked some more. According to Lennon, “The waiters, when they’d see the musicians falling over with tiredness or with drink, they’d give you the pill [Preludin, a variant of amphetamine]. You’d take the pill, you’d be talking, you’d sober up, you could work almost endlessly–until the pill wore off, then you’d have to have another.”
This hellish life went on for three months, until George Harrison was deported for being underage in mid-November. This brought the Beatles’ stay in Hamburg to an end.
By the time they were through, they had worked 90 hours a week for 90 days under impossible conditions — a total of over 1,000 hours — without a single day off.
It’s been said that Hamburg was where the Beatles became the Beatles. But still ahead were enough setbacks to make most people quit.
How much they improved and, finally, became famous worldwide
According to John Lennon, “In Liverpool [before 1960], we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones at every gig. In Hamburg, we would play for eight hours, so we really had to find new ways of playing…. We got better and got more confidence, playing all night long…. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.”
Stuart Sutcliffe, a band member at that time, wrote in a letter, “We have improved a thousand-fold since our arrival and Allan Williams, who is here at the moment, tells us that there is no group in Liverpool to touch us.”
Despite their tremendous improvement, the band members almost gave up — but fortunately for us, they didn’t. They gained larger and larger audiences in the UK in 1961 and 1962.
Still, five record labels rejected them; Decca told them flatly, “Guitar groups are on the way out.”
All that changed on February 7, 1964, when the Beatles arrived in New York City.
It had only taken seven years to become “an overnight sensation”.
What can you learn from this story?
It’s important to learn from your own experiences, but it’s brilliant when you learn from somebody else’s. That’s why it’s time to ask the question, “What can I learn from this?”
You may say to yourself, “Well, I can’t do what they did, so there’s nothing to learn here.” Believing this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. There are five essential elements to any success, no matter how large or small the goal:
- Hard work: You need to do hard work to reach any goal. The larger the goal, the more hard work you’ll need to do.
- Perseverance: You’ll need perseverance when you encounter failures (which is the wrong word to use), run out of energy, or want to give up.
- Solving problems: No goal can be reached by coasting downhill. You should approach each problem as a challenge, and each one you overcome brings you one step closer to your goal.
- Developing new skills: New skills are your secret weapon toward lifelong success. Not only do they make it easier (or possible) to reach your current goal, they’re new tools you can use for the rest of your life.
- Approaching everything as an experiment: You try something and it either succeeds or it doesn’t — that’s what an experiment is. And here’s the most important part: if it doesn’t succeed, you circle back with what you’ve learned and try again. Do this and you’ll solve any problem.
This list may feel overwhelming, but realize that you have already done these things, time and time again. If you don’t believe this, click here to convince yourself that you can do these five things.
The “Do you have what it takes?” challenge
Executive coach Jim Rohn famously said:
“Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.”
I challenge you to have your own experience of success. Anyone can win this challenge; the only way to fail is to give up or refuse to do it at all.
The text below is called a cryptogram, an English sentence written in a “secret code”:
SKO SCV GBMK JGBF WF FBXKO FC GBMK OVNNKOO WD SCVH TWEK
In this cryptogram, S represents the letter Y, K represents E, and O represents S. So sko represents the word yes.
Here is a guide to solving cryptograms: https://www.wikihow.com/Solve-a-Cryptogram
This page describes the technique of “letter frequency”, which you may want to learn: https://baileyspuzzles.com/how-to-solve-cryptograms/
Solving this cryptogram will leave you feeling strong and enthusiastic about tackling real-world challenges. Are you willing to do this?
Here’s how I screwed up…
I spent much of my life in thrall to the sentiment we hear everywhere, that there are secret “tricks” that will make you successful faster and without all the struggle.
But nothing worked. Ever. And I wasted so much time.
Here’s my own success story: It took me seven years to gain 13,000 followers. I worked hard for thousands of hours. I taught myself a lot of new skills. I experimented a lot, failed a lot, and kept trying until I succeeded.
It has been been a defining experience in my life. If I can do this, what else can I do?
…and what you can do instead
You now know the secret of success. It’s not what you wanted to hear, but it has the advantage of being true, as proven through the stories of countless successful people.
You can make your life much better. You can be successful. You can accomplish important things.
Are you willing to do what successful people do?
